TRY is a network of vegetation scientists headed by Future Earth and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, providing a global archive of curated plant traits. The TRY database is a research platform of iDiv. In 2007 the TRY project was initiated, aimed at bringing together the different plant trait databases worldwide. In this context TRY is not an acronym, rather a statement of sentiment. Since 2007 the TRY database has accomplished an unprecedented coverage. It contains more than 5 million trait records for 1,100 traits of 2.2 million individual plants, representing 100,000 plant species. About halve of the data are geo-referenced, providing a global coverage of more than 12,000 measurement sites. Data sharing in the context of the TRY initiative is organized by commonly agreed intellectual property guidelines. Based on these guidelines the TRY initiative has integrated about 250 datasets, including original datasets of unpublished and published data, but also collective databases like LEDA, GlopNet, BiolFlor, SID, EcoFlora and many others, which have already combined several original datasets. In the context of the TRY database the trait values are standardized, quality checked and made available for scientific projects upon request. As the TRY database contains published and unpublished data and because the database contains a large range of additional information for each individual trait value, only a minor part of the data can be provided for direct download. However, so far we have received more than 450 proposals requesting data from the TRY database and first articles are being published. Five years after initiation it now looks like TRY is becoming more than 'just a try'.